Warriors Don't Cry

Historians often denote a relatively brief chronological period in the middle of the 20th century, typically 1948 to 1968, as the Civil Rights Movement. The effort to integrate Little Rock Central High School, resulting in Melba’s Warrior’s Don’t Cry, falls during this time frame, which is denoted as the epoch in which Black and white activists sought through dramatic efforts to achieve racial equality for all citizens of the United States. While there were many attempts to end persecution and achieve equal rights for Blacks before 1948, and though efforts continued afterward, this 20-year period saw significant milestones related to the struggle for human equality.

Activists focused on several important areas to achieve equal rights, including economic opportunity, voting representation, and access to public institutions. For Melba and the other members of the Little Rock Nine, the Civil Rights Movement’s focus on equal education was most significant because it involved them personally. Before the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court, federal law allowed school districts to provide “separate but equal” educational facilities that, in practice, segregated white from Black students and were not equal. The Supreme Court struck this down in 1954. Though it would be years before the broad impact of this touched every school district in the nation, Black children in Little Rock felt the impact immediately, as their teachers sent them home from school early on the day of the ruling. On this day, Melba narrowly avoided being raped by an angry white man. Through the concerted effort of the Little Rock NAACP, administrators devised a plan to gradually integrate its public schools, a first-of-its-kind effort in the nation, the implementation of which Melba records in her memoir.

Historically, the final event of the Civil Rights Movement is often viewed as the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. Two years after this, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously wrote that Civil Rights in the US would benefit from a period of “benign neglect.” While legislative work on Civil Rights issues declined, work to secure educational equity continued, particularly through an extremely controversial period of forced busing to achieve racial equality in schools from 1970-80. At the close of her 2007 update, Melba notes that the goals of the Civil Rights Movement have not been fully achieved and that she continues to be an activist for equality.